Nūrī al-Mālikī

Nūrī al-Mālikī, also spelled Nouri al-Maliki, in full Nūrī Kāmil al-Mālikī, also called Jawad al-Mālikī, (born July 1, 1950, near Al-Ḥillah, Iraq), politician who was prime minister of Iraq from 2006 to 2014.

Mālikī’s grandfather was a prominent poet and briefly (1926) a government minister. Mālikī earned a B.A. (1973) in Islamic studies at Uṣūl al-Dīn College in Baghdad and an M.A. (1992) in Arabic literature at Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn University in Irbīl, Iraq. In 1963 he joined the Daʿwah, an underground Shīʿitepolitical party. Despite party splits, Mālikī remained faithful to the original faction. In 1979, facing persecution from Saddam Hussein’s regime, he left Iraq for Jordan and then moved to Syria and later Iran, where he arrived in 1982. The Iraqi government condemned him to death in absentia in 1980. In Iran he joined hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shīʿites who had fled their homeland or been deported to Iran by Saddam. Mālikī spent most of the decade of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in Iran, and in 1989 he relocated to Damascus, where he became the head of the Daʿwah Party’s Syrian branch.

After U.S.-led forces toppled the Baʿth regime in April 2003, Mālikī returned to Iraq. (SeeIraq War.) He became deputy head of the committee responsible for purging former Baʿth Party officials from government jobs and was elected to the Transitional National Assembly in 2005. He served as the senior Shīʿite member of the assembly’s committee that was charged with drafting the new Iraqi permanent constitution. In the general election of December 15, 2005, Mālikī was reelected a member of the assembly as part of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), the Shīʿite bloc. The UIA won a plurality of seats and chose a Shīʿite, Ibrāhīm al-Jaʿfarī, another Daʿwah Party leader, to be the first full-term prime minister. Jaʿfarī’s candidacy, however, was opposed by the Arab Sunnis and the Kurds, who regarded him as a divisive figure. Following a four-month ministerial crisis, the UIA nominated Mālikī in April 2006, and he became the new prime minister. He formed a government of national unity with a cabinet that included not only UIA leaders but also members of the Arab Sunni, Kurdish, and secular blocs. Though known throughout his years in exile as Jawad, Mālikī decided in April 2006 to resume using his birth name of Nūrī.

Mālikī’s prime ministership was marred by instability. Violent and intractable warfare between Sunni and Shīʿite militias and a rampant anti-American and antigovernment insurgency together created economic paralysis and a lack of security in the country. An increase in U.S. troop levels in early 2007 had some initial success in stemming the violence, but Mālikī failed to achieve any significant political progress. In March 2008 in Baghdad he met with Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose country supported Mālikī’s government; it was the first visit by an Iranian leader to Iraq in nearly 30 years. Later that month Mālikī launched a government operation against the Shīʿite militia of Muqtadā al-Ṣadr in Al-Baṣrah; the fighting ended only after Ṣadr ordered a cease-fire. Although Mālikī called the offensive a success, many believed that his government had been further weakened.

In the country’s March 2010 parliamentary election, Mālikī and his State of Law coalition—comprising the Daʿwah Party and other groups of various ethnic and religious backgrounds—were narrowly defeated by the secular coalition of former prime minister Ayād ʿAllāwī. Mālikī claimed that there had been vote fraud in Baghdad, but a partial recount confirmed ʿAllāwī’s victory. Because neither Mālikī nor ʿAllāwī held the number of seats required to unilaterally form a cabinet, negotiations to form a governing coalition followed. After an extended period of deadlock, the major political blocs reached a power-sharing agreement in November that allowed Mālikī to continue as prime minister.

Mālikī’s critics accused him of unlawfully consolidating power and using his influence in the security services and the judiciary to punish his political and sectarian opponents. In 2011 an arrest warrant was issued for Tariq al-Hashimi, the vice president and the highest-ranking Sunni political figure, on charges of having orchestrated sectarian murders. Hashimi denounced the charges as being political in nature and fled the country.

Partly because of the perceived heavy-handedness of Mālikī toward Sunnis, sectarian polarization increased in 2012. Popular protests demanding his ouster were held in Sunni regions of the country, and bombings reached levels not seen since the height of the war in 2006–08. The breakdown of intersectarian trust ultimately benefited radical Sunni militants. In 2013 al-Qaeda in Iraq merged with some radical Syrian groups under the name Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL; also known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), and in January 2014 the group began to take control of the majority-Sunni areas in western Iraq, forcing government troops to withdraw. In June ISIL fighters seized major cities in northern Iraq, prompting fears of a full-blown civil war.

The crisis was damaging to Mālikī, who was seen as being largely responsible for the marginalization of Sunnis. In April 2014 Mālikī’s State of Law coalition had won the largest number of seats in parliamentary elections, which appeared to pave the way for Mālikī to serve a third term as prime minister, but he soon found himself resisting domestic and international pressure to step aside in favour of a less-divisive figure. In early August Haider al-Abadi, another member of the State of Law coalition, was nominated instead of Mālikī to form a new cabinet. Mālikī initially denounced Abadi’s nomination as unconstitutional but relented when it became clear that he had lost the support of Iran, the United States, and Shīʿite leaders in Iraq.